


heart pumping wine

by brightblackbird



Category: Rookies - Morita Masanori & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Canon - Manga, Changing Tenses, Deities, God/Worshipper AU, M/M, Shinto, Youkai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 19:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11652789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightblackbird/pseuds/brightblackbird
Summary: Lesser gods, and lesser followers.





	heart pumping wine

Imaoka has a selfish, thoughtless, arrogant god, he knows; but he adores him anyway. Hiracchi's more human than anybody he ever met before he came here. He was left, expecting not much of anything, to stop the earthquakes, and he's happy to be a sacrifice if it keeps Hiracchi out of trouble.

He's happy here, with no one coming back to bother them.

He's not sure what anyone could do to Hiracchi, really, if they came, but he gets so upset about not being anyone's favorite. So Imaoka kisses his hands and the back of his neck when he's moody to keep him from destroying things, and he keeps the shrine cleaner than it was for years before he came, even if Hiracchi complains it's boring to look at now.

His kisses are more like bites; awkward and grumbling in frustration at himself for doing it. They start from behind, at the ear; just a hot tingling at first until he shifts from _present_ to _embodied_.

_(At the very beginning he was just a kind of floating aura of frustration, sort of oval-shaped most of the time and darting back and forth across the shrine, knocking over the old, unused pottery. Imaoka noticed him only gradually, after he'd stayed the first night on the floor and gone out for some food, tired of sitting around waiting to be eaten. He'd imagined some kind of giant bear, or maybe a catfish. Or no god at all, just more earthquakes until the shrine fell over and settled things for him the natural way._

_But the shrine buzzed so furiously around his breakfast that it was hard not to look up and_ notice _._

 _Yes, the earthquakes were him. No, he didn't want to stop. Yes, he did so know how to, he just didn't feel like explaining it. And no, he didn't want any_ damn _food. This last punctuated by the sound of breakfast hitting the floor._

_The buzzing in Imaoka's ears while he cleaned up breakfast was almost unbearable, but fortunately it hadn't been much breakfast._

_What he wanted, further questioning revealed, was a parade. Imaoka considered this, considered that buzzing in his ears all the way back to the village,_ _considered how many things there were to be knocked over in the village, and offered instead to clean the shrine up before the whole part happened where he got eaten._

 _After that the whole shrine was out of sorts for the rest of the day, and the statue in the back vibrated too menacingly to be cleaned, so Imaoka amused himself with a few of the scrolls until the presence got_ _bored enough to relent. Nothing here was from his village, so all of it had the appeal of gossip about long-dead strangers._ _The people in charge of the shrine had moved, as far as he knew; not because of the earthquakes but long ago, before he was born._ _It seemed strange to leave their god behind to cause trouble for other villages, but Imaoka had never understood any of this too clearly._ _He gave up on figuring out their logic and returned his attention to the guardian spirit having a tantrum out of loneliness. That was easy to understand._

 _They established on the following day that the presence was not interested in human food, in either sense of the word._ _He might, though, be persuaded to take on a shrinekeeper, just as long as nothing was rearranged too much._ _Everything had a very good reason for being where it was. Imaoka nodded thoughtfully and had all the decorations back to their original positions within a month._

 _The buzzing did stop, after they'd gotten it clear that when Imaoka left the shrine, he was planning to come back._ _And also that it was pointless to punish him after he was back instead of keeping him from leaving in the first place.)_

He's not sure when exactly it started being Hiracchi there instead of the angry buzzing, whether it was slow or sudden. Probably both, in a way. He does go back to the first way sometimes, but he likes yelling and complaining too much to stay like that for long, and he likes knowing Imaoka can tell where he is. He spends a worrying amount of time tripping, and everything ends up knocked over anyway, but he likes the sympathy and he stays stubbornly in human form unless he's really sulking. Or embarrassed. And he's usually embarrassed when he starts kissing.

So Imaoka waits until the feeling on the back of his ears gets thicker, and then takes the hand now at his waist and pulls Hiracchi around to the front, and lets him growl and bluster until he gets settled down and his hands are warm and solid. He's never sure if that's from Hiracchi calming down, or if this counts as some kind of worship.

But if worshipping him were all it took, he'd be solid every second of the day.

What he does know is the attention makes Hiracchi more real, keeps him going, and Imaoka does a lot of it, down between his legs on the altar until the walls start to rattle and there's a halo of heat around his head, or brushing his hair out in the sun until he sighs and stops complaining. They float when he dozes off, and he needs his face stroked for a while before he remembers how to put their weight back.

The way he sleeps is like a cat, almost, never completely unguarded; but it's in the sun, head resting in Imaoka's lap, that he comes closest. He doesn't seem to suffer from the lack of dreams, and the shrine might lift off the ground if he slept any harder, so Imaoka lets that be. If it ever does float away, it'll leave him behind on the ground, human and as cold as he used to be before he came. Right now, on the porch of the shrine, Hiracchi might as well be the sun. Only the weight in Imaoka's lap reminds him there's any difference.

He thinks absently one day while he's straightening a wall scroll that it's been a long time since he needed to eat anything, but he knows Hiracchi won't ever admit to anything, so he doesn't bother asking. They sleep together sometimes now, just resting for long, long spells among the old scrolls and bolts of cloth. And Hiracchi has dreams, long lonely ones that leave him faded and shivering but never wake him up. Birds perch on the statue at the back of the room and Imaoka rouses himself to shoo them away. Then he shakes Hiracchi awake, tugging his arms and nipping his ear if he has to, until he's his own self again. And he dusts the shrine and gets it tidy again, and Hiracchi catches him giving some humans a scare and doesn't say anything. He'd started doing it in case they tried to take him back, but there's no one left to do that now. Now if anybody comes near the shrine it'd be to smash it up and take things away, or worse.

They might leave someone else.

It's quiet here, probably too quiet and too lonely for a god, but the sun still shines in and the birds still try to build nests where they shouldn't, and Imaoka is going to keep waking up as long as they do. Because when they sleep it's together and even by night it's like sunlight. He was human to start with and even if it doesn't work quite the same as it used to, there's no human now or ever who wants to be here as badly as he does. And there's never, ever going to be a day when Hiracchi needs to be woken up and there's no one here to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> (hiratsuka is not, strictly speaking, a god; the kami to whom the shrine was originally dedicated left along with its worshipers when they were forced to relocate. hiratsuka is a peevish youkai-like spirit born from the remnants of the abandoned shrine decorations. so this is actually a youkai/human->youkai au, but neither is aware.)


End file.
